Steven Mnuchin, who stands to be the third Goldman Sachs alum to serve as Treasury secretary in the past 17 years, offered some encouraging words for his former colleagues hoping that a Donald Trump administration will loosen regulations on Wall Street. Mnuchin said the president-elect's "number-one priority on the regulatory side" would be to "strip back" certain parts of the Dodd-Frank Act, President Barack Obama's signature financial-reform package.

"The number-one problem with Dodd-Frank is that it's way too complicated and cuts back lending," Mnuchin said in a CNBC interview Wednesday.

While Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer has vowed to block any legislative changes to Dodd-Frank, there remains much a Trump administration can do to weaken the law without congressional approval. For instance, it can roll back or simply not enforce regulations created to carry out the law.

Consider the Volcker Rule, which at heart is a simple idea: Government-guaranteed banks can't use their own capital to make risky bets in the market. But the banks lobbied fiercely to establish very specific rules of the road, and their efforts led to a final version of the law that grew to 272 mind-numbing pages. Mnuchin told CNBC the Volcker Rule is "too complicated and people don't know how to interpret it. We're going to look at what to do with it, as we are with all of Dodd-Frank."

At a conference last month, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker defended the rule he fought to implement in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. "Go and speculate all you like," he said, "but not on my dime."

Mnuchin's contention that regulation has caused banks to dial back credit is contradicted by Federal Reserve data showing that lenders have become more accommodating in recent years, especially when it comes to small-business loans.

A Fed study released in March of some 3,500 small companies across the country found that 47% had applied for credit last year, and about 80% of them got some or all of the financing they wanted, a big increase from 2014, when 65% of firms were approved, and 2013, when just 54% received financing. The study also found that just one in five small businesses seeking credit was denied a loan last year, down from 35% in 2014 and 44% in 2013.

If confirmed, Mnuchin would be the third Goldman executive to serve as Treasury secretary, following Robert Rubin, who served in the Bill Clinton administration from 1995 to 1999, and Hank Paulson, who worked under George W. Bush from 2006 to 2009. Both had much more senior roles within Goldman and were better known outside the firm than Mnuchin. Rubin was co-chairman and co-senior partner when he left for Washington, and Paulson was the chairman and CEO. Mnuchin was a Goldman partner who specialized in mortgage and government-debt trading before leaving in 1999 to launch a hedge fund called Dune Capital. He bought OneWest, a failed California thrift, after the financial crisis and later sold it to CIT Group. He now serves on the Manhattan-based lender's board. He also produced several films, including Batman v Superman and The Lego Movie, before becoming finance chairman of Trump's presidential campaign.

Stripping back Dodd-Frank could also have a considerable impact on the city's economy as many accounting and consulting firms have invested heavily in people and technology to help banks, hedge funds and private-equity firms comply with the law. The Jersey City-based Global Association of Risk Professionals saw membership increase by 70% between 2009 and 2014, the year when more than 32,000 people took its test to become certified risk managers.

In addition to shackling financial institutions with lots of new regulations, Dodd-Frank steered Wall Street to change its hiring and pay practices. Many bankers and traders were shown the door and replaced by people in audit, risk and compliance roles. In 2013, the highest bonus at Citigroup was awarded to the chief risk officer. Last year, Bank of America paid its chief risk officer $8.7 million, about the same amount that went to the executive who heads Merrill Lynch.

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Medallion Financial is the nation’s preeminent taxi lender and one of the largest owners of the metal plates that confer the right to drive yellow cabs in New York City. Uber has hammered the business and in the past three years Medallion’s stock price has sank by 83%, to a bit more than $3 per share. The number of loans more than 90 days overdue quadrupled to 17% over the past 12 months and in the summer the company slashed its dividend to a nickel a share from a quarter to conserve cash.

With seemingly few other levers to pull, President Andrew Murstein on Monday declared the phones were open, and invited shareholders and journalists to chime in with whatever was on their mind. “There’s zero to hide, the company is doing extremely well,” he said at the beginning of a free-wheeling hour-long conference call. “Except for the stock price.”

Nearly all the callers agreed that Medallion must use whatever cash it can to buy back more stock, in order to demonstrate to the marketplace what a bargain the shares really are. But when they demanded Murstein spend his own money on Medallion shares, the president replied he had already done so and seemed to indicate he’s gun-shy about buying more.

“I own 1.4 million shares,” he said. “Nobody took a bigger hit on the dividend than I did and no one took a bigger hit on the stock fall.”

Even though Medallion has a lot more delinquent customers who seem on the brink of default, Murstein insisted the company has ample reserves to cover any losses. So far, his firm has written off less than 1% of taxi loans and he argued Medallion, which has been writing taxi loans for decades, prepared better than other lenders for the market’s collapse. Medallions sold for more than $1 million in 2014 but now go for only $600,000, according to the city’s Taxi & Limousine Commission, reflecting the steep drop in people hailing cabs from the street.

Painful as that drop was, Murstein said the New York market has stabilized and taxi drivers’ fortunes are poised to improve because taxis can be more convenient for many people than summoning an Uber by phone. He added, a bit hopefully, that Uber will be forced to raise rates as its business matures and drivers demand higher pay. “I believe the worst is behind us,” he said.

Above all, he urged callers to ignore short-sellers and other critics forecasting the company’s doom.

“We’re still a very profitable company,” Murstein said, despite analysts’ reports that Medallion remains in the black thanks to complex accounting rules that allow it to boost the value of a banking subsidiary even as its core taxi-lending business bleeds red ink. “There’s this hysteria out there based on falsehoods.”

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Jennifer Ross is what you’d call a catch. “Kind of perfect,” reads the email from a source. “Smart, pretty and a CPA!” She is all those things, as well as funny, confident and a natural storyteller.

Ross (not her real name), 38, has lived in Manhattan for 16 years, and in that time she has been in one long-term relationship, which lasted about 18 months.

“I’ve dated guys for two months here and there, and for different reasons we’d break up,” Ross said, “maybe because our schedules didn’t align, or it just wasn’t forever.”

But like a lot of single New Yorkers, Ross is looking for forever.

Theoretically, the odds are good that a person can find a soul mate among the 3.2 million single New Yorkers between the ages of 18 and 64.

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Even during a divisive campaign, Donald Trump kept saying something that was music to my ears: We must fix our airports. Singling out LaGuardia, Kennedy and Newark airports, he lamented at the first debate, “Our airports are like from a Third World country. ... You come in from Dubai and Qatar ... you come in from China, you see these incredible airports.”

Trump’s win is an endorsement of the long-held agenda of the Global Gateway Alliance, the organization I founded and chair, to improve the region’s airports. The president-elect ran on the platform of boosting investment and modernizing the nation’s transportation hubs, rightly singling out New York’s deteriorating airport terminals and physical infrastructure. Indeed, his promise to spend $1 trillion over the next decade on infrastructure through public-private partnerships and private investments from tax incentives would go a long way to bringing the nation’s airports into the 21st century.

However, with critical terminal- modernization projects already underway in New York, we must also fix the capacity problem. More than $6 billion has been invested in new terminals at LaGuardia, JFK and Newark, and the plan to modernize LaGuardia will add $8 billion more, but without expanding our runways and modernizing air-traffic control, these dollars will go to waste and the chronic delays costing a fortune in lost time and productivity will continue.

Elsewhere, our rivals are not resting. After many years of debate, the British government is taking steps to increase its airport capacity by lending support for a third runway at Heathrow. British officials know they must invest in infrastructure to maintain their nation’s global standing as a major airport player. The decision comes a year after Heathrow dropped in the international rankings for passenger traffic to sixth from third.

New York, meanwhile, has the most congested airspace in the world, making arrivals and departures more challenging to orchestrate and giving rise to roughly a third of all delays in the U.S. The physical constraints of our runways intensify the problem. A recent Global Gateway Alliance study ranked the three New York-area airports in the nation’s bottom five for delays this year, with LaGuardia dead last.

The stakes are high. Our airports are economic engines for the region, generating approximately $116 billion in annual economic activity and accounting for more than 590,000 jobs. And yet flight delays caused by congestion at the three airports are projected to cause $79 billion in losses to the regional economy by 2025 and 39 million unserved passengers, according to the Partnership for New York City.

The first step to expand capacity is getting the federal government to fully roll out NextGen, a satellite-based air-traffic control technology, in the New York airspace to replace our 1940s-era radar.

We also desperately need new runways. Runway projects face community opposition and numerous regulatory hurdles, but they are essential.

The Regional Plan Association set forth several runway configurations for JFK and Newark that we should think seriously about. They include expanding runway access into Jamaica Bay at JFK and building a third western runway parallel to the existing two at Newark. In addition, ReThink Studio’s “ReThinkLGA” proposal would expand LaGuardia onto Rikers Island, giving the airport access to two runways over 10,000 feet long.

The path forward may not be smooth, but it is clear. The capacity problem is the No. 1 issue facing New York airports and will only worsen the longer we wait to install modern airspace technology and better runways. As Trump looks to implement his ambitious infrastructure plan, it’s time to take a page out of London’s book and modernize our airports’ infrastructure both on the ground and in the air.

Joe Sitt is chairman of the Global Gateway Alliance, a regional advocacy organization established to address the major challenges facing the metropolitan area’s airports and related infrastructure.

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Brookfield Property is reportedly looking to sell a 49% stake in its 8-million-square-foot lower Manhattan office project—formerly known as the World Financial Center—according to a Real Estate Alert report summarized in The Real Deal.

The Toronto-based firm poured $250 million worth of renovations into the project, and considered selling a stake in 2014. It has hired Eastdil Secured to market the share, which could be worth $5 billion. In its most recent earnings call, Chief Executive Brian Kingston said that core real estate assets in the United States continue to be a desirable option for overseas investors.

Through FilmStruck, a film streaming service that launches Nov. 1, owners Turner Classic Movies and the Criterion Collection are making a play to appeal to a group of devoted film fans, underserved by Netflix or Hulu, who want to see critically acclaimed films on demand.

The move is part of a larger trend in the development of niche streaming services that highlight curation and community.

“Large [streaming services] are like superstores that offer a lot of general things to a general audience,” says Jennifer Dorian, general manager of Turner Classic Movies. “But streaming can also be a great platform to super-serve a niche of fanatic fans.” She added that Turner estimates the market for film fanatics to be about 13 million to 15 million people. “We feel like that's a sizable audience to go after, and worthwhile.”

FilmStruck offers three different subscription plans—two monthly, at $6.99 and $10.99, and one annually at $99—that give viewers access to a library of classic films culled from 29 different distributors. The collection of more than 1,200 films includes rare titles licensed by Warner Bros. along with those from smaller companies such as Janus, Kino and Milestone. The main attraction, though, is the inclusion of the more than 800 titles housed under the Criterion Collection, which will exclusively be featured on FilmStruck.

Since 2011, Criterion had licensed its films to Hulu, which has a total of 12 million subscribers. The deal lent the popular service a level of prestige, despite accounting for only a very small amount of the service's total film streams. The licensing deal was renewed in 2014, but will officially end on Nov. 11, when Criterion films will no longer appear on Hulu.

“As much as Hulu was a really good place for us to start, our ability to control what's shown and when things are made available is something we could only do if it's close to home,” says Jonathan Turell, CEO of the Criterion Collection. “I don't think we're ever going to reach the Hulu numbers, but that's OK. We can cater to a person who [is] part of this audience, and make something that's fun.”

Both companies are eager to stress that FilmStruck will not replace their core audiences who watch their movies on the Turner Classic Movies cable channel or on Criterion's Blueray and DVD offerings. “FilmStruck is designed for a different target audience that skews younger, people who are already streaming and investing in entertainment,” Dorian said.

]]>Thomson Reuters Corp. is eliminating 2,000 jobs worldwide as the news and information provider restructures to focus on growth areas like its risk and legal units.

The company will take a fourth-quarter charge of $200 million to $250 million, mostly in its enterprise, technology and operations group, as part of the cuts, according to a statement Tuesday. The resulting savings are projected to be of “a similar magnitude” to the charge, it said. The shares jumped as much as 5.5%, the biggest intraday gain in more than 5 years. It traded up 4% to $41 at 10:53 a.m. in New York.

Thomson Reuters has about 50,000 employees, according to a company spokesman. So the cuts, disclosed in an e-mailed statement, will affect about 4% of its workforce.

In an earnings call, Chief Executive Officer Jim Smith cited “a more challenging revenue environment than we had expected at the start of the year” and said the charge “allows us to significantly simplify the business and deliver more value to customers.”

The cuts come even as Reuters reported third-quarter profit that beat analysts’ estimates as its core financial subscription businesses improved, bolstered by growth in the Americas.

Earnings excluding some items rose 20% to 54 cents a share, the New York-based company said in the statement. That compared with the 47-cent average of analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Revenue from continuing operations was $2.74 billion, slightly below analysts’ projections for $2.75 billion.

Smith and Chief Financial Officer Stephane Bello are relocating to Toronto, the company said last month as it expands its Canadian operations with a new technology center in the city. Thomson Reuters, which provides news, data and analytics to the financial industry, law and accounting firms, corporations and governments, in April forecast revenue growth of as much as 3% for the year, excluding discontinued operations.

Thomson Reuters agreed in July to sell its intellectual property and science operation to private equity firms for $3.55 billion. It plans to use proceeds to buy back shares, repay debt and reinvest in its businesses, including financial, compliance and tax products, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.

Sales at the financial division, the company’s largest, rose 1% to $1.52 billion. The unit’s adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization increased 10%, or 7% before the effects of shifting currencies. Revenue was little changed in the legal unit and gained 6% in the tax and accounting division. Adjusted Ebitda fell 1% in the legal unit and climbed 9% in the tax division before adjusting for currency moves.

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Maybe it's time for New York to build a wall around Wall Street.

The city's share of jobs in the securities industry has hit fresh lows, currently accounting for less than 19% of all U.S. securities industry jobs, according to the latest Labor Department data, well below the 30% share the city boasted two decades ago.

The exodus began in the early 1990s when banks and brokerage firms started moving administrative and back-office workers to lower-cost locales across the Hudson, often in return for hefty tax breaks. The city's Wall Street middle class was hollowed out, but its tax base wasn't harmed because the higher-paying jobs mostly stayed put.

That could be changing, however, because in recent years, cost-conscious banks have begun moving higher-end investment-banking and analyst positions out of town. In July, Deutsche Bank said it would add 300 positions in Jacksonville, Fla., where it currently has about 1,600 staffers, up from just 100 in 2008. In August, Citigroup said it plans to boost its Jacksonville workforce by 20%, or 800 people. Goldman Sachs' Salt Lake City office, which opened in 2000, employs some 2,000.

The fiscal well-being of both the state and city remains closely tethered to the financial industry, despite efforts to diversify the economy by stoking sectors like tech and tourism. Wall Street contributed more than a sixth of the state's tax revenue last year and accounted for more than a fifth of all private-sector wages paid in the city.

Although the securities industry makes up less than 5% of the workforce, the Partnership for New York City estimates that 700,000 jobs in sectors like restaurants and retail depend on financial-services dollars.

Meanwhile, even as New York's big banks beef up elsewhere, their overall head count is falling. Citi has let go of 8% of its staff in the past 12 months, or 19,000 people, while Goldman has eliminated 5% and Morgan Stanley 2%.

But there may be good news on the horizon for New York: the bad news in Britain. The ranks of Wall Streeters could rise as bankers flee London in anticipation of the U.K. exiting the EU. In a conference call last week, Goldman finance chief Harvey Schwartz said, "Brexit potentially is something that could drive share to the U.S."

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Six years after George Gjieli left federal prison, where he'd been sent for trying to break out a triple murderer, Donald Trump gave him a job running Trump Tower, where the billionaire businessman lived and worked.

For a decade the Albanian immigrant, whom federal prosecutors had described as having "utter disdain for the laws of our country," was the live-in residential superintendent of Trump's most prized Manhattan high-rise. Meanwhile, he was accused in court papers of coordinating a cash-for-jobs racket inside the building, an Associated Press review has found.

Trump's decision to entrust responsibility of his namesake Fifth Avenue skyscraper to Gjieli adds to a growing public accounting of men with questionable backgrounds whom Trump has hired or partnered with. The AP and others have reported they include a Mafia-linked government informant whom Trump named as a senior adviser and a convicted cocaine dealer whom Trump supported in a letter to a federal judge.

Gjieli, who said Trump wrote him a recommendation letter when he left Trump Tower in 2001, denied taking kickbacks including cash in envelopes delivered to his 29th floor office. In an interview, he called the allegations "bulls--t," likely made by Romanian building workers harboring generations-old European ethnic rivalries.

The AP uncovered no evidence that Trump knew of money being paid for jobs. His presidential campaign spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, declined to address whether Trump ever conducted a background check before hiring Gjieli. She said Trump wasn't familiar with the kickback allegations.

"Mr. Trump's management style has led to the creation of one of the great private companies anywhere in the world," she said.

Trump himself has said he cares more about his supervisors' ability to get things done than their tactics or pasts, writing approvingly in his best-selling Art of the Deal about a "con man" project manager who likely stole $50,000 annually from the company, including from his secretaries' funeral fund used to buy flowers.

"Even so, I was probably getting a bargain," Trump wrote, saying the con man—it was not Gjieli—was a good manager.

When Trump hired Gjieli after a face-to-face interview in 1991, the man didn't mention his criminal past and Trump didn't ask him about it, Gjieli said. Records of his conviction were publicly available at the time and recently reviewed in detail by the AP.

They show that government wiretaps from the 1980s captured Gjieli's efforts to bribe a U.S. Treasury agent with $100,000 to get a fellow Albanian immigrant serving life terms for triple murder out of a Michigan state prison.

Gjieli told the agent that the imprisoned man "shot the f--k out of them. Boom," using a racial epithet to describe the three black men killed during a 1976 robbery attempt, according to a transcript. Gjieli and two associates were later convicted in the jailbreak plan.

"The fact that (Gjieli and his associates) offered a special agent a bribe lets you know what they think of law enforcement," said Jim Covert, then an Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent, according to excerpts from the grand jury testimony from the 1980s. "They just figure they can buy anybody."

Paying kickbacks was also at the center of a wrongful termination lawsuit against Trump and the Local 32BJ labor union, which is associated with the Service Employees International Union, filed in 2004 by a fired elevator operator named Ioan Ghilduta. He alleged Gjieli had forced workers to pay for their positions.

"Sure, all the guys pay the money," Ghilduta said in a 2005 deposition , according to court documents obtained by AP, describing the $1,000 in cash and a gold crucifix he said he was made to give to his boss in 1994. "It was a common practice when you get the job."

Ghilduta didn't respond to phone calls, text messages and an in-person visit to his home.

The Local 32BJ union declined to comment for this story. The lawsuit was settled shortly after a judge ruled there were issues of fact a jury should hear. Ghilduta walked away with $7,500 apiece from Trump and the union, neither of which admitted wrongdoing.

In a close-knit service industry, word of Gjieli's influence spread, drawing in workers like Gabriel Mitrea, who recalled in an interview with the AP taking the elevator up to Gjieli's Trump Tower office in the late 1990s with $2,000 cash in an envelope to secure a doorman job at a non-Trump-owned building near Central Park.

Internal Trump Tower employee manuals show workers are expected to remain discreet about their duties, and some workers declined to discuss their experiences with the AP because they said they didn't want to get into trouble.

Discretion remains a Trump imperative: Earlier this year he settled a lawsuit against a campaign worker whom the billionaire had sued for $10 million, claiming he violated a non-disclosure agreement.

Still, some workers, like Cornel Nedelcu, spoke glowingly about Trump and recalled receiving gifts from him, such as pairs of used Gucci shoes and trousers.

Nedelcu was named in a deposition as having known about kickbacks. He denied to the AP that he paid for his job but acknowledged that "others may have."

Ilie Malancea did pay, according to his family. His wife recalled that, in the early 1990s, they had to purchase a gold chain that cost between $500 and $1,000 as a mandatory "gift" for Gjieli.

For Malancea, who worked at Trump Tower for two decades, that payment foreshadowed further troubling interactions with his bosses, including Gjieli's successor, according to journal entries provided to the AP.

In one case, Malancea raised concerns of a faulty elevator and wrote he was lambasted for suggesting to a resident it was unsafe rather than merely out of order. In another, he complained his pay was withheld after coming late from a doctor's appointment following heart surgery.

He wrote in an undated journal entry that a supervisor was hostile "towards me (without apparent reason) lately using threats of being fired, choice words, constantly accusing me of breaking the rules, not being a team player?!?, being late etc."

"Gjieli had a criminal past," said Jennie Malancea, 27, the daughter of the elevator operator, who is now deceased. "That's a pretty big deal for someone that you're hiring, and is hiring other people."

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It could be days before federal investigators working in 12-hour shifts clear enough debris to recover the data recorder from a train that crashed into a station, killing a woman and injuring more than 100 others.

National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Chris O'Neil described the effort as "complex" and said workers are going as "quickly as possible to make that happen."

The effort comes as investigators learned that a separate device that was supposed to record the New Jersey Transit train's speed and braking information wasn't functioning, according to the National Transportation Safety Board Vice Chair T. Bella Dinh-Zarr.

The remaining data recorder, which officials said was likely to be newer than the nonworking device, is in the cab control car in the front of the train and has not been recovered because it is under a collapsed section of the station's roof.

Officials say they hope to access that device "in a matter of days," O'Neil said.

"You hear all the machinery in the background. They are working around the clock, in 12-hour shifts, to remove the debris as quickly and safely as possible," he added.

Federal regulations require commuter trains to have a working recorder in the lead car, according to Jim Southworth, the NTSB's lead investigator for the crash.

The regulations also require the recorders to be inspected every year. It was unclear when the recorders in the train were last inspected.

Federal officials said the recorder that didn't work was an older device installed in 1995. An unknown number have had to be replaced over the years as they failed.

Investigators have said the train's engineer, Thomas Gallagher, told them he was going only 10 mph as he approached the station, but he had no memory of the crash, according to Dinh-Zarr.

He said he only remembered waking up on the floor of the engineer's cab, she said.

Gallagher also told investigators that he was fully rested and that the train was operating properly Thursday morning before it crashed in Hoboken.

Months before Thursday's deadly train crash, federal rail officials found dozens of violations during an audit that focused on NJ Transit's safety and operations, a U.S. official confirmed to The Associated Press.

The official, who was familiar with the Federal Railroad Administration audit, wasn't authorized to speak publicly about an ongoing investigation and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

The audit was launched after the federal regulatory agency noticed an uptick in rail incidents and found "dozens of safety violations" that needed to be fixed immediately, the official said. The commuter rail agency was fined as a result.

A spokesman for NJ Transit hasn't responded to requests for comment.

On Monday, Democratic Assemblyman John McKeon called on federal and state railroad officials to give a public accounting of the agency's safety violations.

"It's very disturbing to learn that a data recorder pulled from the crashed NJ Transit train in Hoboken wasn't working. This is inexcusable," he said.

Since 2011, NJ Transit trains have been involved in more than 150 accidents that caused more than $4.8 million in damage to tracks or equipment and has paid more than $500,000 to settle safety violations, according to federal data.

Information from the Federal Railroad Administration shows that NJ Transit has settled 183 safety violations—ranging from employee drug and alcohol use to violations of railroad operating rules or practices—since Jan. 1, 2011.